Which song has Kate Bush played the most live?
Kate Bush is far more renowned for her studio work and music videos than she is for her live performances. She could even be considered something of a recluse, given that she is rarely seen in public at all, let alone on stages around the world. One of the most mysterious and impenetrable personalities in popular music, Bush has famously only performed one real tour in her career.
In early 1979, in support of her incredible debut album, The Kick Inside, and its rush-release follow-up, Lionheart, Bush embarked on ‘The Tour of Life’. For 28 shows, staged across six weeks and in 20 different European countries, Kate Bush brought her beguiling and fantastical albums to life with a mixture of music, mime, magic, and theatricality.
‘The Tour of Life’ closed with a three-night stint at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, and Bush wouldn’t return to the stage for such a spell for another 35 years when her mammoth 22-date ‘Before the Dawn’ residency picked up at the very same venue where she had left off almost four-decades before.
Bush never meant to stay away from the road forever, though, later explaining to the Independent in 2014, “it wasn’t designed that way, because I really enjoyed the first set of shows we did. The plan at the time was that I was going to do another two albums’ worth of fresh material, and then do another show”.
While these two major runs of shows are her most famous, they are far from her only performances. Before she released her first record, Bush had made a name for herself on the live music scene in the south of England. As well as taking up residency at The Rose of Lee in Lewisham, south London, The KT Bush Band also developed their sound and built up a strong following by performing in various clubs, bars and hotels around southeast London, Essex and Brighton.
Performing a diverse mix of rock and soul covers, such as The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’ or the Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong song ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ Bush was already dazzling her ever-growing audiences with her own compositions.
Following the whirlwind release of her first two albums and the subsequent tour, she has made sporadic live appearances as well. In 1982, she performed ‘The Wedding List’ at The Prince’s Trust Rock Gala at the Dominion Theatre, and in 1987, she joined long-time collaborator David Gilmour at the London Palladium for a one-off rendition of ‘Running Up That Hill’.
Whenever Bush makes an appearance or performs in person, it is a huge event. While there has been a relative scarcity of performances through the years, she has an endless supply of incredible songs to choose from when she does perform.
So, which songs has she performed live the most?
While it’s no surprise that her most performed song is from her first album—given that she was playing pieces from it live pre-fame and on tour in support of the album—what is a little more surprising is that it’s not her debut single, ‘Wuthering Heights’, the song that catapulted her to the top of the charts, the Top of the Pops, and launched her career.
With a grand total of (an estimated) 35 career performances, ‘Them Heavy People’ was not only performed at every date on ‘The Tour of Life’ but also with The KT Bush Band before the wider public ever got a chance to hear The Kick Inside. Released as a single in Japan, Bush promoted the track by performing it live for ‘TBS TV’ in Tokyo in 1978 and followed that with another televised rendition later in the year, this time in New York for Saturday Night Live.
The song’s final performance – so far, at least – came during the ‘Kate’ TV Christmas special, recorded at the BBC’s Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham in October 1979. It seems unlikely that we will hear Kate Bush sing ‘Them Heavy People’ in concert again anytime soon, but then again, Stranger Things have happened.
